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Censorship
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overview
This note considers bans (or partial restrictions) on
publication of diaries, memoirs and letters by politicians,
their advisers and senior officials.
It covers -
It
supplements the discussion of censorship
& secrecy elsewhere on this site.
introduction
Official memoirs and correspondence, whether disinterred
from the archives after years of obscurity or published
on a 'kiss and tell' basis when the author has made a
carefully stage-managed exit from government, have tended
to be drearily soporific rather than a threat to good
governance and public order. Few have the charm of UK
Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's letters to his mistress
(penned during Cabinet meetings as Britain lurched into
war), the diaries of Thatcher acolyte Alan Clark or the
cabinet paper marginalia of Bismarck. Fewer still offer
the insights into policymaking processes and personalities
provided by diaries from figures such as Richard Crossman,
Edward Hamilton or Lord Granville.
In the UK, Canada, Australia and elsewhere governments
have, however, sought to inhibit publication by ministers
and other politicians, advisers and senior officials.
Restrictions have encompassed both release of information
while those figures are in office and, more contentiously,
once they have relinquished power.
Some restrictions have been based on secrecy legislation,
for example the UK Official Secrets Act, on contracts
or on legislation covering the behaviour of officials
(eg the federal Public Service Act and Crimes
Act 1914 in Australia). Others have embodied informal
understandings or administrative protocols such as the
'Radcliffe Rules' in the UK.
They have been defended as necessary for the provision
of forthright, cogent advice to ministers and for effective
public administration. Critics, to varying degrees, have
acknowledged the need to preserve confidentiality about
particular matters (eg national security and justice)
but argued that restrictions should 'fade' with the passage
of time, commenting that information is sometimes suppressed
to prevent personal, party or institutional embarrassment
rather than because release jeopardises continued existence
of the state.
Others have called for more open government, noting a
tendency to exploit secrecy through selective or systematic
leaking - notably 'off the record' briefings by advisers
and MPs - in contrast to restrictions on public criticism
by officials.
Some observers have thus supported an absolute ban on
the release of information about the shape of cabinet
discussions (with only outcomes to be published) during
the life of a cabinet and for a finite time afterwards,
beyond which politicians would be free to recount what
was said behind the closed doors. Some have similarly
supported release of memoirs by officials after retirement,
subject to editing in order to protect information of
particular and ongoing sensitivity (eg that enables the
identification of personnel in security forces).
Moves to suppress particular information - or particular
memoirs - have thus been contested and on occasion embarrassing,
with the Thatcher government for example experiencing
international humiliation over failed action against Spycatcher
and its successor encountering difficulty in dealing with
'what the butler saw' exposes from former staff in the
royal household.
evolution
Expectations about government secrecy, personal privacy
and professional confidentiality have evolved unevenly
over the past two hundred years. Frameworks for managing
the memoirs, diaries and correspondence of those 'in the
know' have become more systematic - with a move away from
tacit gentlemen's agreements - and to a substantial extent
more pragmatic, particularly in dealing with senior figures
rather than middle-rank officials.
Prior to 1914, Westminister system Cabinets - along with
most households - operated on the basis of personal confidentiality.
Recordkeeping was surprisingly informal. Officials and
some ministers for example lamented that it was sometimes
unclear what decisions had been taken (or why) and that
figures such as UK Prime Minister Lord Salisbury had a
tendency to absent-mindedly take key documents home in
their coat pockets.
Perceptions that official documents were personal property
and that politicians were entitled to special use during/after
service were exemplified by Winston Churchill's appropriation
of Admiralty memoranda, reports and other documents during
the 1914-1918 War (the basis of today's Churchill Archive).
In 1922 Churchill persuaded his Cabinet colleagues that
they be allowed to "vindicate their actions"
by publishing "necessary" official documents,
an agreement gleefully exploited by Beaverbrook
and others. In 1927 Stanley Baldwin, closing the gate
after the departure of horses such as Churchill, banned
ministers in office from journalism (with exceptions for
writing about "historical, literary or scientific"
issues) and sought to retrieve post-1919 government papers.
Churchill 'reminded' his ministers in 1945 to return documents,
with the important proviso that they could retain items
that they had authored or signed. Churchill's memoirs
- like those of his successors Anthony Eden and Harold
Macmillan - were cobbled together from official material
and acclaimed as history; there was no such welcome for
insider accounts such as that from Elizabeth II's nanny.
Two decades on publication of the backbench and cabinet
diaries of UK Minister Richard Crossman provided information
about deliberations within the Wilson government, resulting
in greater formalisation of what ministers and officials
should do (notably the 'Radcliffe Rules', indicating that
ten years or three elections was sufficient for the confidential
nature of most Cabinet information to lapse) and a spate
of memoirs.
Attempts to stop publication of Crossman's diaries (eg
on the basis of a breach of confidence) were ineffective.
Anthony Howard commented
Any
back-bench MP is perfectly entitled to record his daily
observations and life in parliament and then, if he
is lucky enough to find a publisher, to communicate
them to a wider public. The problem with Crossman, so
far as the Cabinet Office was concerned, arose from
his determination to give what Sir John Hunt, the cabinet
secretary of the time, described as 'blow-by-blow' accounts
of what actually went on within the Wilson cabinet.
The authorities of the period were probably right in
regarding this as setting a most disagreeable precedent—a
precedent, incidentally, that was soon to be followed
by two of his cabinet colleagues, Barbara Castle and
Tony Benn (and much later, from within the ranks of
the Conservative Party, by the junior minister Alan
Clark). Where the guardians of tradition erred was in
lacking the nerve to reach for the ultimate Domesday
weapon, the then still fully extant Official Secrets
Act. Instead, they sought to extend the law of confidentiality
(with a rather arcane pedigree reaching back to some
Victorian etchings) to cover the content of cabinet
discussions.
That
fumbling approach was reflected in responses to accounts
by members of the intelligence services and servants.
Disgruntled UK agent Peter Wright divulged information
in 1986 through his book Spycatcher, published
in Australia despite legal action in Australia and the
UK. A decade later former MI5 operative David Shayler
provided information to the Mail on Sunday in
breach of the Official Secrets Act, fled to France
and was arrested on his return to the UK in 2000. MI5
czar Stella Rimington released an autobiography. Sundry
Windsor servants spilled the beans on life behind the
gold doors, although the tittle tattle offered few resounding
revelations.
In Australia former federal/state ministers such as Peter
Howson, Paul Hasluck, Bob Hawke, Peter Walsh and Neil
Blewett have discussed Cabinet processes and decisions
in their memoirs or interviews. Blewett colleague John
Dawkins commented of his 1999 A Cabinet Diary: a personal
record of the first Keating government
Had
Michael Keating - the Cabinet Secretary during the period
covered by this diary - written this book he would have
been charged under Section 70 of the Crimes Act. It
appears that former ministers can reveal cabinet secrets
while former public servants cannot.
Blewett had dismissed fears of prosecution, commenting
I
think that the rules are absurdly restrictive in this
country. I mean, the fact that cabinet minutes, which
are just simply the decisions of cabinets are not available
to historians for 30 years, that the description of
cabinet debates are not available for 50 years. That
is all out of kilter with the sort of open government
of late 20th-century democracy.
After
2000 former UK government advisers, ministers and officials
such as Jeremy Greenstock, Robin Cook, Christopher Meyer
and Derek Scott provided candid accounts of contemporary
deliberations about the Iraq War, relations with the US
and infighting within Whitehall.
Others, such as Lance Price, were advised that publication
was "completely unacceptable" - leading to claims
that suppression was arbitrary, driven by personal animus
or intended to deter publishers.
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